Ask HN: Relocating to London After Brexit
How do you think Brexit will affect software /startups in Uk ?
Do you think London will maintain its reputation as the opportunities city?
As another comment says, you’ll mostly get political comments, so here goes: UK universities, while still very good, are dropping quite significantly in various league tables since Brexit. This is for a range of reasons: non-UK applicants now get a full US-style price, with little support or loans. They are less attractive for academics too. 2/3 of UK unis dropped since the Brexit votes, Cambridge is at a historical low of 7th in the world, behind ETH. Student visas are sth like £1000 per year on top of that. If you think this will continue, and talented and driven young people will choose other countries, this will extinguish, in the long term, the supply of talent to startups and tech.
UK’s attitude to immigration will also be unpredictable. On the one hand, it states that it is keen to attract talent etc, on the other hand visas will be largely awarded based on salaries (maybe not so good for early stage startups). Also there are no guarantees that eg the partner of a visa taker will be awarded one, or that visas will be extended. This is another reason why people might give the Uk a wide berth - and these would be potentially your cofounders, colleagues, investors.
On the flip side, finance was thought to leave London en masse, and didn’t. Banks etc established a presence in EU countries, but most of the business logic staff are actually staying out.
Also UK is at heart a country of innovation, where novelty and innovation are welcome, and entrepreneurship runs in the blood, more so than in many other places. Brexit won’t change that.
So... who knows? I’m an EU citizen, now also British and well settled here. I like it, but probably wouldn’t choose it now.
> I saw a list of European unicorns (on HN in fact I think) and probably about 2/3 were UK/London based
While unicorns are an interesting measure (even though it favours the biggest startups - are 2x 500Mi startups "worse than" 1x 1Bi startup?), I always wonder how much of it is some form "language blindness". How much value is on startups or companies that don't get on HN or "don't speak English" much?
This is probably quite good for VC funded companies, as there is some transparency in this. But, apart from the arbitrary 1bn cutoff, what is a startup? What about more established, but still innovative companies? What about ones that are not VC funded?
It's a bit early to say, isn't it? Finance is still working under temporary arrangements. Most of the regulations regarding services remain to be negotiated.
As far as regulated business goes, it was clear from the start pretty much that there will be no passporting. The extent of other regulatory burdens remains unclear.
The point is, unless some highly unexpected new regulation comes in, it looks like banks at least kept the business and decision making in London, and only moved enough operational staff to EU to support operations there.
Funds for sure seem to have stay put in London, some moved but this is definitely a minority.
I’ve seen it reported that £1 trillion of assets were being moved out. Was that report incorrect, or was it a misleading number that is somehow vastly less relevant than it appears at first glance?
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/20/business/brexit-economy-b...
In practice, for the Brexit/London question, it seems London banks set up small offices in the continent to ask as a front for regulators and EU clients, moved capital as necessary, but kept all significant business in London - so far at least.
Remember, this is finance, capital is transferred via a wire. It’s not mining, real estate or farming.
When you wrote that “funds” mostly stayed put, what do you mean by “fund”? An ELI5 style explanation would be great, because to me (with no economics/finance qualifications) a “fund” is the money.
It's also questionable in the long run whether the EU will permit all of these transactions to take place if the bank has only a token presence within the EU. At the moment everything is happening under temporary authorization.
I'd be a lot more worried about the general shift to working from home than leaving EU when it comes to London's importance as a tech center.
Are there good sources out there that would afford a holistic cost comparison of a typical London lifestyle (Tube, 1-bedroom in Zone 1-2, weekend abroad in Europe, etc.) vs SF, LA or NY for instance?
Otherwise agree that long-term the work from home trend could be slightly more concerning, but this won't materialise as soon as most think. There is still a lot of value in being physically close to networks of influence and decision-makers, which in the UK would very much still remain in London.
If you're at FAANG (which the original post was talking about) then there's little advantage of free healthcare imho. You get top of the line company paid for healthcare. You can see a top specialist in a week with no referrals needed and someone almost as good same day.
Edit: it seems I am wrong. I commented a bit too fast.
> most [specialists] will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked"
I don't deny that this does happen, but it's not as inevitable as you make it sound. I've seen about a dozen separate specialists over the years for various reasons, and have never had such problems. There were a few outliers where I had to wait several weeks for an appointment, but that was only for non-urgent matters and I was never refused service. In most cases, I can get an appointment within 1-5 days of calling the doctor's office.
My suspicion is that such overload as you describe is a regional issue, so if, as an immigrant, you need to rely on certain specialists because of chronic ailments, it may be worth to investigate the availability of the relevant specialist doctor beforehand.
Based on what I've heard it's not a given in the UK for example. Need non-guaranteed GP referral (ie: they may say no) for a specialist and there's often a long waiting period.
I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better). The same would be true, I believe, for child birth for instance (again, I could be wrong as relying on second-hand accounts in both cases).
Agreed on the type of specialist you would get in the U.K., although in my experience it’s always been very feasible to see top specialists when warranted, even on public healthcare. You would typically get faster access for non-essential care on a private basis though.
Overall, it seems from Yours and other comments that the salary multiple in U.S. tech specifically may still be significant and would probably make these moot.
UK, yes. In France, aren't there copayments? I thought the French system typically covers 70% of hospital bills.
The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?
Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.
Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.
What I was initially pointing at was, if you think about the portion of pay one gets, and the portion of pay that goes to the state, I think high taxation is often worth the money in terms of quality of life, because it delivers goods that are simply beyond anybody's budget otherwise. Jeff Bezos can't go on a 4am walk through LA without a shadow of worry, but I can do that in my city. That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.
Obviously money on its own doesn't solve deeper issues - and Europe has a lot of problems, especially around questions of nationality and belonging. But I think in the narrow sense, of what you get for what you pay, high tax - welfare state societies are generally competitive even for very high earners, just because they deliver a lot of things that you literally can't pay for, no matter how rich you are.
Sure he can, his multiple well armed guards will ensure he is safe even in the worst part of LA at 4am. He also has multiple homes and I guarantee you that his suburban homes have little crime around them. Cities aren't primarily where the well off live in the US and the places they do live are very safe.
An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes. London does this better than many European cities but it still has a long way to go. Living on a tech salary in London is a bit like living on a good non-tech salary in SF or Seattle. Comfortable in the abstract but there is visibly a tier of people that the city culture values much more.
I find this super interesting, especially when linking salary back to how much society values that job type. For instance it seems that many European countries value societally their teachers and professors, yet it is a rather underpaid profession, all things considered. Similarly, a maitre d’ would be quite well regarded in France or Italie, yet would not command a high-salary.
Thus it feels like your point on there being more diverse sectors being cogent with a comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. rings true.
Veering away from the main point, but I wonder if, as pointed in other comments, that is somewhat balanced by less people being, comparatively, in the poor and very poor category. That is to say, less of a difference between top lifestyles and bottom lifestyles overall. I would need to properly research that though, as salary alone won’t give us that variance.
I think "poor" is relative to cultural expectations, so I am not sure how to measure that over different geographic regions. The infamously poverty-stricken regions of the US, like Appalachia or Mississippi, really do have serious systemic poverty but even the middle-class there is often viewed as poor by the standards of other regions. However, the lifestyle afforded by the 40th percentile household income in most European countries would identify as "poor" in much of the US, despite being definitionally middle-class. In much of the US, "poverty" is primarily associated with social problems like drugs and crime, not economic resource issues per se outside of a few sparsely populated regions, which isn't that different than what I see in Europe. I grew up in abject poverty of non-social kind, which is pretty rare in the US. In hindsight, I think the government did a reasonable job of handling that case.
[...]
>An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.
The way I've explained this to people is that it's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of your profession in any industry without ever moving to NY or LA, except maybe finance for NY and film/television for LA.[1] The equivalent is possible in Australia, Canada, and Germany, but impossible in the UK or France.
[1] And even here there are exceptions. For the entirety of the century that Hollywood has been "Hollywood", the creative types in LA have worked under control of the money men in NY. This is still true, except that the money men are now also in Dallas (AT&T), Philadelphia (Comcast), or Tokyo (Sony). In finance, one can become a managing director at a New York investment bank while always based in a regional office like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or San Francisco (I think Byron Trott never left Chicago during his Goldman career).
I can't see innovation, talent or companies moving to the EU at any stage. It's a regulatory horror show and has massive brain drain to places that actually pay developers reasonable wages.
Developers in Sweden are paid the equivalent of 51k USD. This means even including cost of living such as health insurance, you can make substantially more in the US, London or Switzerland.
Developers in the EU get shafted big time. Free health insurance is not worth half, or even one-third the salary.
It’s called solidarity
I’m not complaining about the situation. Supply and demand determines IT wages quite well. For some reason US based devs are simply more in demand.
We can argue about why this is, but the end result is that asset prices are high, while there's no incentive to cycle money through the economy in a way that allows wealth building.
Not even the government is willing to spend, which is a problem because the government has set itself up to be the subsidizer of everything. The scale of the problem is easily appearant when you see Brussels celebrating a €10b climate package. Exactly what is €20 per citizen supposed to achieve?
In some ways they have a much healthier startup scene than SV does.
You won't earn $400k - guaranteed until the restructuring and breakup layoffs hit - but you will be happier and less stressed, and your kids will be too. And you won't be living in a city that has become a dystopian nightmare.
If you're all about the money then of course you won't get what's cool about the EU.
And that's fine. Because not only do companies have cultural fit, so do countries.
It's millions. The delta between the average US salary and the average EU salary is gigantic, and if invested in a conservative investment portfolio consisting of index funds means by choosing to live in the EU you're willingly giving up many millions of dollars by time you're in retirement.
When I'm retired, I don't want to be broke and penniless and I certainly wouldn't be thinking that the free healthcare I received was worth the amount I was scammed.
On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.
51k when you're doing the same stuff that someone in the US is making 175k for? You're being robbed in broad daylight.
To put it another way, consider that a senior level developer in Sweden makes substantially less than a fresh grad in the US.
Yeah, other people in other countries make more money, and it was a competition for who is richest when they die, Sweden would really suck. But I really enjoy my life here, and I don’t plan to wait until I retire to do that. (And I lived abroad for five years, including 2 years in the US, so I have something to compare with).
Ok, but I’m still wealthier in my 30s than most people are when they retire — my biggest regret in life to date is not having a family, not the even bigger pile of money I could’ve earned if I’d gone to Silicon Valley or invested £10k into BTC in May 2010.
> On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.
You're missing pensions, which EU countries have, which mean in most cases you won't find yourself broke and penniless when you retire. And work hours, which are substantially less. And vacation time, which is literally multiple times more ( 5 weeks paid minimum in France for instance), and "unlimited sick time" ( it's sick there's even such a concept in the US). What good are your millions if you have to wait to retirement to actually use them, being too busy working 60 hour weeks? Or having to go into work sick? Or ffs, after the birth of a child?
I know that this is far from what everyone wants, and wasn’t what I looked for 10 years ago, but for me, now, it is almost perfect. And I don’t think there’s many places in the world I can live like this.
Realistic salaries more generally also can't be taken out of the wider context of living in a country with different social values and funding of them (I'm trying to be polite in reference to the comparative British/European vs USA perspectives of and funding with regard to social support and social disparities).
London is expensive compared to Canadian cities, even Vancouver, but pay for tech workers is comparable, if not a bit lower than in Canada. The US has higher pay than both, but it's only about 30% and you have more cost out of pocket, especially healthcare.
Much of the energy in London in the past 20-30 years is driven by EU nationals. A lot of multinationals and tech companies are based in the south-east to access this talent pool. Many companies have whole teams based in London serving the respective European markets (French speaking, Germans speaking, Italian speaking, etc.). This will change in the next decade or so.
and likely less attractive as a place for to non-Europeans to work, since they can't get access to Europe via London.
Finding workers for your unicorn startup in the UK will be much more challenging.
Some will say no because of possible tariffs the EU could apply to sales into the Eu. It tends to forget that the rest of the world exists.
Some will say yes given the UK now has the ability to reduce taxes, invest in areas that it couldn’t before and provide competitive opportunities which anyone in the EU couldn’t
So it’s really down to the UK to take advantage of its freedom.
Isn't that what the 2000 page trade deal they just signed is for?
> It tends to forget that the rest of the world exists.
the EU offers unilateral zero tariffs on all goods except weapons to all Least Developed Countries. Seems a strange way to "forget that the rest of the world exist"
The biggest macro thing would be free trade treaties with markets like the US and Asia (obviously including China, but elsewhere too) and streamlining regulatory standards to be efficient - not to be all “oh no the big capitalists will exploit everyone,” just better targeted and less bureaucratic; you can glimpse this in the way the UK was first to approve vaccines for covid.
But all that has to compete with maintaining trade access to the EU and that’s a huge barrier if it remains and a huge loss if it doesn’t.
What’s supposed to make startups and tech more competitive there now? Maybe if the Euro collapses in a banking crisis somehow (?!?) but I’m not seeing it.
I'm an American that lived in London for 2 years in the 90s - the high tide for an American abroad - so that's the POV I bring to your question. The following decades have seen mostly retrograde changes. I cannot imagine it becoming -easier- for a non-native in Britain in the 2020s... can you? Germany and even France now bring a genuine interest in cultivating technology economies by welcoming global investors AND workers. I would put Berlin or even Paris ahead of London for the next decade if you're looking for an exciting soup of technology culture, opportunity, reasonable costs, and relative freedom to operate. I'm not being arbitrary in saying this - the company I co-founded, Spoonflower, runs its European operations out of Berlin.
That said, I loved London and still do - such a civilized place to visit. I was there just before Covid times, and was absolutely amazed by the changes to LHR immigration and Crossrail that allowed me to go from deplaning my transatlantic flight to my hotel in central London in 55 minutes. I can't wait for the city to re-open and Crossrail to be complete. There are few pleasures to equal a walk by the Thames on a long sunny day - perhaps summer 2021?
• Mutual recognition of qualifications: usually not as important in software as what you do after your degree, but even when it is the “engineer” in “software engineer” isn’t a protected term.
• Customs and border controls: solution for software is “the internet!”
• Work visas when visiting the content from the UK: apparently not needed for short business trips?
• Work visas for those going to the UK: IIRC the UK wants a minimum pay threshold such that most of us would reject a pay offer that low even straight out of university.
• Pay/living costs: possibly a real issue — as others point out, the UK is already not very competitive for pay and London is somewhat expensive.
•• Regarding pay: while the exchange rates may swing sharply in the next few months, I expect that a year from now they will mostly be close to the current values.
•• Regarding living costs: if it hasn’t been for COVID, I’d have expected housing costs to go down and everything else to go up (when measured in £), given COVID I have no idea what to expect.
I’d actively try to dissuade you if you were doing anything involving hardware, chemicals, medicine, law, space, or food; and I’d still put 5% on this developing like the Northern Ireland Troubles; but software as a particular domain is probably either fine, or at the very least the problems will be unrelated to Brexit.
But, one obvious impact will be labour supply. Fewer European area devs will come to the UK, which will make things less attractive for big tech companies.
Both this question and the question that OP is asking have been on my mind a lot lately. But I don't really have much choice in the matter, because of my situation. I was living in the US for 7 years but I had to leave because I did not get the H1B visa. I could have gone to Canada, but right now they are apparently taking upwards of 9 months to process work permits so I got turned down by a lot of FAANG companies. I ended up deciding to move to Europe.
This decision has been really hard on me for a number of reasons. Other than the fact that all my friends are there and so are all my professional connections, being a first language English speaker, I think that I would also feel more at home in the US or Canada. Then there is the matter on compensation and opportunity. El the only things I've heard about jobs in the EU is that there are few opportunities and the pay is less. I feel like I've been forced to take a step backwards in my career.
In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be (for example with deregulation or the removal of GDPR or the reduction/easing of bureaucratic proceses). In my experience betting on the British government to do the right thing is a bad bet. They have the digital London effort but it seems more like a PR stunt than a good-willed effort to attract startups.
You will also encounter strange socio-economic effects that you would not see in other places, for example being an engineer and starting a startup here is viewed as a negative while being a business major is a positive. There is a big divide between capital and labour that perpetuates itself through these stereotypes that are not present in places like America.
You're right that in a lot of the UK software folks are viewed as 'beneath' the management and business types though, and not valued in the same way as they are in other economies. Useless arseholes with few worthwhile skills can get paid a ton if they can talk themselves into a position as a delivery manager or project manager.
(Note that is just from the perspective of a startup)
Unless your business model revolves around usage of personal data, in which case GDPR is a very useful set of minimum baseline requirements for handling the data, compliance is fairly trivial.
If they decide to delete their account and request that they be forgotten, delete that data that you only needed while providing the service.
It's not hard to comply, and it's a cost of doing business that you have to accept. If you implement it right, then you'll be compliant by default. Not sure how not being compliant is a positive for any startup.
It's the law in the EU, so unless you want to cut out a market of half a billion people, you have to comply.
Your experience might be a bit more localised to the part of the UK you're in than you think rather than being a UK thing. I've never found people care enough to provide negativity or positivity regarding where you've chosen to specialise your education in most cases.
>In terms of brexit, any sort of gains for a startup will be possible only if the British government allows them to be
Agreed. Lack of access to capital and the lack of tax planning for anyone but the rich holds the UK back compared to the states. I don't agree with much the current government did, but one sentiment that Cummings expressed that was correct was that when novel tech gets bought over by US giants (eg Deepmind), is a failure on the UK's part. They're essentially allowing all the future upside to be exported.
Not that I blame anyone that accepts a buyout offer, if they didn't, then there'd probably be no upside to capture at all due to lack of risk-taking private funding.
Brexit will only have an effect if the government do something big like make a massive tax haven for certain industries and there's only talk of increasing taxes to pay for Covid.
Pick a place for the people not the scene. Be a digital nomad until you find a connection.
The UK is good for a market to sell into because of the strength of the pound and because it's a service based economy. These two things are not going to change.
If you’re coming from a less well-off country and have the flexibility to take advantage of any post-Brexit easier immigration flux, I’d definitely take the risk and go for it.
If you’re coming from a country that’s roughly as prosperous and have some luxury of time, I’d delay any decision by at least a year.
There will most likely still be more opportunity in London than anywhere else in Europe, but hard to tell what it’ll be like compared against the rest of the world.
Care to elaborate?
Sure, that's just two avenues that jump to mind. There may be many more less orthodox routes that appear as the dust settles. We're witnessing a major shift in the status quo.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-uks-points-ba...
[1] not been there for a while, those numbers may well have changed
Also, taxes will go up soon to pay for the current economic depression.